Medical Gadgets

Wheelchairs are the only way some people are able to be independent. People that simply lack the stamina to walk or suffer from some sort of injury that resulted in inability to stand or walk often find themselves bound to a wheelchair as their only way to get around. A professor of mechanical engineering from Japan has unveiled a new wheelchair design called the willPersonal Mobile Vehicle is able to move in any direction.

The field of medical implants hit a new milestone today with the successful implementation of remote-controlled chips that can be implanted and programmed to release medication. With this type of implementation, the idea is that doctors will be able to monitor and moderate dosage remotely with a push of a button.

A woman is recovering today after having a cancerous tumor removed from the back of her throat. Actually, there is probably more than one woman in that situation, but not many of them are waking up today without an incision scar somewhere on her head. She's the first successful patient to undergo robotic surgery for throat cancer, and her doctors are optimistic about her prognosis.

If you are diagnosed with stomach cancer in the early stages, getting back to full health may be as easy as swallowing a tiny crab. Well, not really a crab, and not really "swallowing," either. But that is the general principle behind a new robotic device, developed in Singapore, that is able to grab cancerous tissue and pull it out of the body. The idea of removing cancer from the stomach without needing to cut open the body is revolutionary.

The University of Washington and Microsoft Research have released information on a project they've been working on for some time now, one that should, if completed, allow those with diabetes to monitor their glucose levels through special contact lenses. After reporting weeks and weeks of tech news without such a thing, it's nice to write about a medical breakthrough that comes in the form of gadget advancements in such an elegant vehicle as a contact lens. Without a doubt, if such a project can succeed, there's no doubt we're in the future - now we just need a pair that'll allow me to see when a can of caffeine will have the best effect.

A group of researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo have been hard at work trying to perfect a new blood glucose sensor that can be implanted and glows when the blood sugar changes. The sensor is designed for long-term in vivo glucose monitoring. The study on the sensor was published earlier this month.

It has been more than a year now since we talked about the awesome high-tech and very expensive artificial limbs made by a company called Touch Bionics. These hands are able to sense the electrical pulses from the muscles in the arm of users and activate artificial bionic hand. The artificial hand is so high-tech that the user can do just about anything they are able to do with a normal hand.

Baldness is one of those things that our capitalist society manages to rail against something fierce. We have foams, drugs, surgeries, and old-wives tales all centered around the dreaded idea of losing your hair. I think hair loss is similar to how silverback gorillas go silver when they're all alpha-male and in-charge. One time I read it had something to do with testosterone. That said, Restoration Robotics just received clearance to market a new robotic system called the ARTAS. It's designed to assist in the hair transplant process by precisely ripping out a hair follicle and storing it until the doc can manually transplant it into the area where the hair is thin.

Years back before I became a full time geek I worked in the hospital for over a decade mostly with people that had breathing problems like asthma. The thing with asthma is that the triggers can vary greatly for many people and the first thing you need to do to control your asthma is to figure out what triggers your attacks and avoid it.

Right now, we're living in a world where we look at more computer generated imagery than anything else. Doctors are reaching a critical point where the amount of medical imagery generated during something like a routine CT scan is daunting to navigate. Kenju Suzuki at the University of Chicago says, "As medical imaging has advanced, so many images are produced that there is a kind of information overload. The workload has grown a lot." Antonio Criminisi leads a group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U.K. working on a system that will make it easier for doctors to work with databases of medical imagery. The system indexes the images generated during the scans. It automatically recognizes organs, and they are working to train the system to detect certain kinds of brain tumors.